US stores spent nuclear fuel rods at 4 times pool capacity

In a recent interview with The Real News Network, Robert Alvarez, a nuclear policy specialist since 1975, reports that spent nuclear fuel in the United States comprises the largest concentration of radioactivity on the planet: 71,000 metric tons. Worse, since the Yucca Mountain waste repository has been scrapped due to its proximity to active faults (see last image), the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission has allowed reactor operators to store four times more waste in the spent fuel pools than they’re designed to handle.

Each Fukushima spent fuel pool holds about 100 metric tons, he says, while each US pool holds from 500-700 metric tons. A single pool fire would release catastrophic amounts of radioactivity, rendering 17-22,000 square miles of area uninhabitable. That’s about the size of New Hampshire and Vermont – from one pool fire.

In a March 25th interview, physician and nuclear activist Dr Helen Caldicott explains that “there’s far more radiation in each of the cooling pools than there is in each reactor itself…. Now the very short-lived isotopes have decayed away to nothing. But the long-lived ones, the very dangerous ones, Cesium, Strontium, Uranium, Plutonium, Americium, Curium, Neptunium, I mean really dangerous ones, the long-lived ones – that’s what the fuel pools hold.”

Nuclear waste, in the form of tiny pellets, are loaded into metal rods, that are then bundled into a “fuel assembly.” The assemblies are stored inside casements that are then submerged in cooling pools that are located at the top of a nuclear reactor, as the following images reveal:

The image at the top of the article shows an entire pool filled with these assemblies. There are millions of these rods around the planet, reports Reuters.

The report recommends that 75% of the spent rods be removed from each of the pools and stored in ultra-thick concrete bunkers capable of withstanding aerial impact. The project would take about ten years and would “reduce the average inventory of 137Cs (radioactive cesium) in U.S. spent-fuel pools by about a factor of four.”

The NRC attempted to suppress the IPC report, Alvarez says. “The response by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and nuclear industry was hostile.” But the National Academy of Sciences agreed that a fire in an overloaded fuel pool would be catastrophic. The NRC attempted to block the Academy’s report, as well.

The NRC serves industry, not the public, and by controlling the purse strings, Congress has forced the NRC to “greatly curtail its regulatory programs,” says Alvarez.

Engineer Keith Harmon Snow couldn’t agree more. He recently lambasted the NRC and mainstream media for downplaying the ongoing catastrophe in Japan. He notes that, “The atomic bomb that exploded at Hiroshima created about 2000 curies of radioactivity. The spent fuel pools at Vermont Yankee Nuclear Plant (U.S.) are said to hold about 75 million curies.” [emphasis added]

Also see this global map of earthquake activity and nuclear power plant locations.

Nuclear waste is a serious, deadly and growing problem that the industry refuses to address, preferring to externalize disposal costs onto the public (even suing the US government to clean up its mess for them, under a 1998 law it no doubt favored).

Unless the radioactive waste is laser-launched toward the sun, we’re stuck with waste that will contaminate the biosphere for thousands of years, for the measly prize of 25-30 years of electricity, as nuclear activist and mathematician Gordon Edwards so eloquently explained. The risk far outweighs the benefit; this energy choice exemplifies the insanity of the nuclear industry and its government protectors.

Berry scary chit mon. NRC = Now Really, C’mon! People need to wake out of their protracted and protected sleep. Is it my imagination, or are people more unwilling to do so since 9-11 and then, if so, what does that say?

Jack, first off, all of us here know that 9-11 was an inside job. That being said, if everyone listened to YOU, we’d all have blown our brains out ages ago. Come up with constructive contributions, or go cry somewhere else, ok?

“The saddest thing is that Americans are cultivated like mushrooms from birth to death, kept in the dark and fed horseshit. Consequently, they haven’t the slightest idea that there is an alternative to the system in which they labor at the pleasure of corporate and financial elites who own both their government and their every waking hour.”

VERNON, Vt. — The nuclear crisis in Japan is bringing new attention to the ways nuclear waste is being disposed of and stored in New England, especially considering that the United States does not have a national disposal site for waste.

A special investigative series from Hearst Newspapers and the New England Center for Investigative Reporting looked at Indian Point in New York, along with the seven nuclear power plants located in New England.

The report found that many of those plants are beyond their initial designated capacity for storage of nuclear spent-fuel. In each case, the storage of additional spent-fuel was approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

At the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant, located just over the New Hampshire state line in Vernon, Vt., the report found that the plant is storing five-times the spent-rods that it was originally designated for.